Justin Kuritzkes Breaks Down His Viral ‘Potion Seller’ Video As We Look Back On The Classic Meme Nearly A Decade Later

here have been many viral videos to emerge from obscure corners of YouTube over the last 15-plus years, but only a select few have stood the test of time and remained relevant well past their original upload date. In 2011, Justin Kuritzkes was one such unwitting YouTuber who began sharing clips of himself playing around with the Photo Booth app to create characters and humorous skits. Over the last decade since then, Kuritzkes’ videos have become beloved by millions of people online thanks to well-known skits such as “Potion Seller” and “In a Perfect World.”

We recently chatted with Kuritzkes, whose series of Photo Booth videos skyrocketed him into meme stardom over the 2010s, inspiring numerous memes, animations, remixes, fan art and tributes, to break down how they came to be and why he really created them in the first place. In the end, we might even learn just who really is strong enough for those potions after all.

Q: Welcome, Justin, and thanks for joining us. Give us a quick introduction and let everyone know what you’re sorta known for on the internet.

A: My name is Justin Kuritzkes and the thing I'm most known for on the internet is this video called "Potion Seller," which is a three-minute video that I made using Photo Booth on my computer where I distorted my face and played two different characters: one of them is a knight trying to buy a potion, the other one is a potion seller who doesn't wanna sell him any of his potions because they're too strong.

Q: Can you tell us a little more about your background before we get into the famous video? How’d you initially get into making content online and when did you start your YouTube channel?

A: So I'm a playwright, and especially around the time I was making “Potion Seller,” I was pretty involved in improv comedy. I started making those videos when I was in college. I was a senior in college and I was working on my thesis. At night, I was really sort of spazzed out from just working so much that I started messing around with the Photo Booth filters, and it occurred to me, like a theater person, that it had some similarities to mask work, which is maybe a little more of a pretentious answer than people might expect for “Potion Seller” [laughs].

I was in a comedy scene in college, so I was used to doing skits and sketches and that sort of thing, but I was never like a big internet comedy person. I was in high school before Twitter was really a thing or TikTok or Instagram. So that wasn't really like where you went if you were the funny kid, you would do the school play instead. But yeah, I wasn't thinking of it as internet content, so much as I just wanted to share it with my friends.

Q: Even before “Potion Seller,” you had already made three similar videos, such as “Dolores” and “Ice Cream.” Where’d you get the idea for these videos and what’s the backstory behind them?

A: So the earlier videos that I posted on my channel, like “Dolores” or “Ice Cream,” those kinda came from a similar place of just finding the face first on Photo Booth, and then sort of improvising until I found a voice that fit that face. Then once I found the voice for the Dolores guy, for example, it just pretty quickly became clear that he was really sad and that his wife had died. I think I did that whole thing in one take. Once I figured out who he was, I just did it. That felt like an extension of doing improv.

I noticed that when I saw how the filter changed my face, it actually made it so much easier for me to create a character. I'm not really the type of person who walks around doing a million voices or something, but when my mouth would be morphed by this weird filter, I just found myself really wanting to create a voice to fit that person. The stranger the morph, the more fun the challenge was of finding what that person or that creature would sound like. So I really just started doing that as a way to amuse myself and started recording them and sharing them with friends. Within the first couple of weeks of doing that, I started putting them up on YouTube so that I could share them on my friend's Facebook pages.

That's basically where the genesis came from. I thought of them as little monologues, like little teeny plays, that's kind of what they were to me. I don't wanna be disingenuous and say it “happened accidentally” or something because I was a writer and an actor … it's kind of what I do. But it was inconceivable to me that they would go viral.

Q: So then you uploaded “Potion Seller” to your channel in 2011 a few weeks after those earlier ones. Can you give us the full backstory of how this beloved video came to be?

A: I think the characters probably just came from me playing a lot of RPGs throughout my life. A lot of people assumed that it had something to do with the Elder Scrolls specifically, which it didn't. I mean I've played those games, so maybe subconsciously it did, but I found the face for the knight first, and he just started saying “potion seller” and one thing led to another.

That was the first video where I figured out that I could do multiple characters in one thing with one filter. So when I discovered that if I leaned forward it would morph my face in a different way, that was just really exciting to me 'cause all of a sudden, it made it feel like high budget [laughs]. "Oh, now we have special effects." "Oh great, we have like a full film production now. We're good. What else do we need?"

But in terms of funny things that happened around the creation of that video, as I was recording it, my roommate at the time heard me doing something in my room and opened my door and you can actually hear it on the video.

Q: Oh really? I don’t think I ever noticed that but that’s hilarious.

A: Yeah, you can hear a door opening, and he just was standing in the doorway looking at me, rocking back and forth, morphing my face, and he couldn't see the screen, so he didn't know what it looked like [laughs]. So to him, I'm just looking like an insane person and he started laughing, which made me start laughing, and that's why that's one of the few videos where I'm really cracking up because my roommate was just watching me.

Q: What did your friends and family say about it when you shared it with them before it became a viral video?

A: A lot of people immediately really liked it, and a lot of people thought I was really depressed [laughs]. Which maybe I was, I don't know. A lot of people really thought I was losing my mind or something. But no, I think most of my friends got it. Most of them were other theater people and artists and stuff, so it was hardly the weirdest thing that we were doing.

Q: When did you start noticing that the video was going viral? Were you surprised by how popular it got?

A: I noticed early on when I was making them that it started being shared wider than my group of acquaintances. So that was already sorta happening, but I didn't notice that it was really doing serious numbers until a year after I posted it. That's when, all of a sudden, I started just getting all of these notifications on YouTube. I was like, "What's going on?" And I think what had happened was that it got posted on Reddit or on some forum. For whatever reason, it just started taking off then. But yeah that was really cool. I was very pleasantly surprised by that and thought that was really fun — especially 'cause it just happened long after it was posted.

Q: What do you think made it sorta “click” with people? Why is it so beloved and popular in your opinion?

A: I have no idea why “Potion Seller” clicked with people, honestly. The specific answer is that I think for a lot of people who were into games, cosplayers, RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons and all of that, they related to it, which is cool 'cause I'm very much a part of that group too. I love all that stuff.

It's really hard to say, though. I think maybe part of what's appealing about it is that a lot of people did that sort of stuff with Photo Booth. Even before that, when I was a kid I would do a lot of that [face manipulation] in the reflection of a sink handle or anything that would distort my face. I would look at it and make funny voices, etc. That was just like a very universal childish phenomenon, so I think that maybe had something to do with it.

Q: In 2014, the video began drawing a fandom online, spawning fan art on DeviantArt of you, a whole subreddit for “Potion Seller,” etc. How’d you deal with this newfound fan base and what was your reaction to seeing your face in memes, fan art and such?

A: My reaction to all of the fan art, memes and all that, I think it's really cool and funny. Honestly, my favorite part of it [the experience of becoming a meme] is that. It's really humbling because I think memes are our culture, that's what your whole website is devoted to, but I think that's serious. I think we're very much past thinking of internet culture as something to smirk about. I’m professionally involved in making culture, but there's such a limited audience for a play. When I was really in the thick of creating most of the early videos, that's really what I was hyper-focused on doing was working in theater. There’s such a diverse community of people who do that, but it’s also a really small community of people who see it because it's so local. It's the opposite of the internet since you literally have to be there.

In 2014, I had just moved to New York and was really trying to make inroads as a playwright and get my work seen, and was struggling in that way. Then to have these videos blow up on the internet was really amazing 'cause it just put my whole career as a playwright into perspective because it was like, “Well, even if I'm the most successful writer in the world, more people will still know me for Potion Seller.” And I found that incredibly liberating. Honestly, if “Potion Seller” is all people know me for, I'm okay with that ‘cause it's better than a play. Anything I wanted to do with something in a theater, I did in “Potion Seller,” so I'm happy [laughs].

Q: That’s a good perspective because sometimes people I’ve interviewed are very frustrated by being known for their meme.

A: Well, on my better days, like any time I'm feeling very self-important or, “Oh, I wish more people had seen that play or read that book or something,” it's really helpful for me to think, “Actually, if my goal was to reach a lot of people, even if it happened in this way, that's really cool.”

Q: Because of how huge “Potion Seller” became, what did your family members or friends think of it and your viral fame after it got big?

A: My aunt told me when it started blowing up and she watched it that she was really concerned about me, but then she got really into the video. Now she's like one of the biggest fans of the videos. For my other family members, one of the things that's funny about it is that I think we're the only family in the world that has our last name, and it's a really particular last name. It’s Lithuanian, so multiple family members have had the experience of paying for something at a coffee shop and the barista seeing the name on the credit card and being like, “Are you related to the potion seller?” Which is awesome. I love it. It's really funny 'cause my family, especially my father's family who has that last name, are really not in entertainment or very online people, so it's funny.

Q: Of all the parodies and remixes out there, do you have a favorite tribute to “Potion Seller” that you think is the best or funniest?

A: The tribute that I've seen the most is the auto-tuned one where somebody added music to it. I also saw somebody do this fan art where they did like a really beautiful like manga cover of “Potion Seller” with the knight and the potion seller, and that blew my mind because it was such an amazing quality of work. But I think part of the really cool thing about the community that seems to respond to “Potion Seller,” in particular, is that a lot of them are like graphic designers and artists weirdly. So I get a lot of really beautiful hand-drawn stuff sent to me, which is so, so incredible. It's people who are already incredibly imaginative and creative responding to that, so I love that, I think it's very cool.

Q: How often do you still receive fan mail and stuff like that?

A: I still receive messages weekly. People don't always send the fan art to me [physically], but every once in a while, somebody will tag me in something on Twitter or something and I'll see that. I've also recorded a lot of birthday messages for people, which is nice when I can do that. But, yeah, people reach out all the time.

Q: Despite the video now being almost a decade old, it still gets frequently referenced in memes and other things, as well as lots of interactions on YouTube. Why do you think it’s lasted so long and remained relevant where others die in mere days?

A: I don't know why it's lasted so long. It's weird thinking about it being 10 years old 'cause even like five years ago I remember people already commenting that this was “from the golden age of YouTube” [laughs]. I was like, "Well, that was five years ago, what are you talking about that it's from the golden age?" I don't know, I think it's really simple and that [nostalgia] is part of it. People have always and will always like making funny faces. They've been doing that at carnivals in fun-house mirrors, and it's been around for hundreds of years or more.

Q: Just in 2019, “Robert Pattinson Potion Seller” became a new meme that referenced your original, so do you remember seeing these memes and how you reacted to them?

A: I loved those [laughs]. Somebody sent that to me and I saw it got a million likes or something on Twitter, and he did really look like a potion seller. He'd be really good at making these videos.

(Two examples of Robert Pattinson Potion Seller memes from the 2019 trend.)

Q: If they make a major motion picture of “Potion Seller,” Robert Pattinson would be your pick to play the role?

A: I mean, he'd honestly be incredible. His voice work is out of this world [laughs].

Q: “In a Perfect World” is probably the second biggest video you made back in the day, so can you tell us more about how you came up with this one?

A: The story of “In a Perfect World” is pretty much exactly the same story as “Potion Seller.” I was just messing around with the filters and found one that I thought was interesting. The big technical innovation that I figured out in that one was that I could move the computer itself. I didn't just have to move my body, I could now move the computer. If you did it on a smooth surface, it would look like a dolly shot or a zoom-in. I mean, this is so stupid [laughs], but there's a shot in film that people refer to as a “vertigo shot.” I noticed that these filters kinda made that happen with “In a Perfect World.” As my face would get closer, the background would get farther away, so that's why I just said one phrase over and over again 'cause I was just focusing on what was happening with the camera.

Q: Since those famous videos went viral, you’ve continued making new content in recent years including a dozen or so from just last year. What’s your current content about and how do you keep it from becoming stale or a chore?

A: Making the content never became a chore or stale for me because I don't really do it on a schedule and I don't think about it as a job. I'm not trying to cultivate a following or something and not doing it with a goal. I kind of made a promise to myself really early on when this stuff started going viral that I was not going to become a content creator. That's not because I think anything's wrong with content creators, as I said earlier, internet culture is just culture, so a content creator is just an artist. That's what I think they are. But I knew that for me, part of the joy of the channel was that it was one area of my creative life where I really didn't want anything from it and I didn't wanna hustle. You get burned out.

What was enjoyable about it to me was how pure it was and how I wasn't making money from it or trying to build a career off of them, and I think people can tell. It's part of the reason I don't like to think about myself as a comedian because a comedian has to be funny every day. For me, that’s the quickest way to not be funny — is to want to be funny and to have to be funny on cue. Again, I have a ton of respect for people who are professionally funny, but for me, that just felt like the worst possible relationship I could have to what made me laugh.

Q: To build off that, why did you continue doing them all these years? What keeps you going?

A: I found it to be really helpful for my creative life to have that outlet. First of all, it's just very grounding to do it. So much of the experience of being a writer, even when you're a successful writer, is that you're waiting for people to let you put your things out into the world, and there was something very gratifying about just being able to go like, "This is gonna get published now." Even when I wrote my book, I finished it in 2018, and it didn't come out until a year and a half later. I really think of it as just another thing that I do, so there's no reason to stop unless I get bored of it. But so far, I really have enjoyed it, and it's this ongoing 10-year-long project. I'm interested if I'll be like 60 years old and still doing this [laughs].

Q: In addition to your video content, you also released the album Songs About My Wife in 2016. Can you tell us more about this creative endeavor and what it was like to work in a different medium than your earlier stuff?

A: The album Songs About My Wife sorta came about as an inside joke with me and my friend who's a music producer. We were roommates in college and he had been making music around me for a long time. I was also like a “choir boy” in high school and was a pretty serious choir kid — competitions and stuff like that. So I would always sing along when he was making music, and we had been joking forever that we should make a pop album one day. Then around 2015 or so, I texted him and I was just like, "Let's actually try to do that," and I think we both sort of showed up to it at first thinking that it was gonna be something we could do really cynically like a sort of parody pop album where we were really making fun of pop music. I think his stuff was really experimental, and my creative life was pretty experimental too, and so I think we both assumed that pop music was made very “manipulatively.”

As we got into it and we started actually trying to do it, we both realized that like, “Oh, no, you actually have to be incredibly vulnerable, and you have to be really sincere.” So for like a week we would just make pop music together and it became this very beautiful thing for our creative lives and for our friendship 'cause we were really showing up every day having to be very honest with each other about what made us “feel delicious” or something [laughs], like what we thought was, "Ooh, that's a fun hook." Then, as we were making it, we knew all along that the idea was to release it on my YouTube channel.

We didn't want his name on it, we kinda just wanted people to think that I was this savant music producer, because that music is produced incredibly well because it's being done by literally one of the best in the world. And then, as we kept making the songs, we were like, "Oh, maybe this is a concept album that sort of ties together the whole channel up to this point," and so it became sort of tied to the “Dolores” guy and the story that he started.

Q: In 2019 you published the novel Famous People. Can you tell us more about this and how it came about? Had you ever done anything like that before?

A: No, I had never written a novel before, and I had never wanted to write a novel. Famous People sorta started out as a monologue. That book is all told through the voice of this 22-year-old pop star who's looking back on his life and is sort of sitting down to tell the story of his life. I started writing it a couple of years ago just because I started writing and fell in love with this kid's voice. I was like, "I wanna hear this kid talk to me," which is how I sort of start everything. That's how I would start my plays, that's how I would start a movie, that's how anything would start, is that I would just sort of let a character start speaking.

Usually what will happen if it's a play is that that character will speak for a while and then someone else will come in and interrupt them, but this kid just sort of kept talking [laughs]. I got like 60 pages into it, really liked it, but nothing had happened yet like there was no plot. So I was like, "Well, if this is a play, it's already gonna be three hours long, and nothing happened yet, so that can't work.” So, I just kept writing it, and then it was a book. I really think about that book as like a long Photo Booth video in book form — or at least, ideally, that's what I hope it is.

Famous People is out today! It's in all the bookstores :) https://t.co/bHF6WNjIdO

— Justin Kuritzkes (@JustinKuritzkes) July 9, 2019

Q: So what other creative projects and things do you have going on these days? Any plans for a full-fledged “Potion Seller” movie or anything like that?

A: [laughs] I don't have any plans for a “Potion Seller” movie or a play. Weirdly, I've thought about it though. Every once in a while I'll be like, "Oh, should I do something with that?" And ultimately, the fun of it is that it's contained, especially for the people who are into it because it reminds them of weird encounters they have in RPGs. Part of the fun for me as a kid about those worlds was that you would just walk into a tavern in some town that clearly the B-team game developers developed. Like the main game director had bigger things to focus on and they assigned this to the young guys. "Oh shit, we forgot to do that village. Can you guys do it in a day?" And talking to NPCs who have so little going on. It's best for “Potion Seller” that it stays like that, but I'm working on a lot of stuff. I have a TV show in development that I can't say a ton about. I'm also working on a movie.

Q: Got a favorite meme to share with us in closing? Perhaps an all-time favorite?

A: My wife showed me this meme recently. I don't know if this is my favorite meme of all time, but it's one that I've been thinking about and trying to embody recently. It's just a goat that’s standing in front of this beautiful flower patch, looking very content in the sunlight with his eyes closed, and it just says, "I am cringe, but I am free." That's my favorite meme currently and one that has helped my life a lot. I'm trying to be cringe and free. If anything, honestly, these Photo Booth videos are the journey of my life, and it's the journey of those videos. It's like I'm really trying to be cringe and free [laughs].

(One of Justin's favorite memes from recent memory.)

Q: For the final question here, we’d like to ask something that everyone wants to know after all these years. So, who really is strong enough for those potions?

A: I have my thoughts about who's strong enough for the potions, but it's for everybody to imagine their own answer to that question.

Q: Alright, I’ll accept that [laughs]. Any final word, closing statement or additional info to add?

A: This was so enjoyable. Thanks for having me on here. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel, it's just my name, Justin Kuritzkes. I have a book out called Famous People, the album is out, Songs About My Wife, and you can listen to that wherever you like to listen to music. Thanks, I'm happy I got to do this.

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Watch our interview with Justin for the video version of our discussion on "Potion Seller" below.

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Justin Kuritzkes is a writer and YouTuber known for his viral videos like “Potion Seller,” which became the subject of memes and fan art throughout the 2010s and beyond. To keep up with Kuritzkes, you can follow him on Instagram and Twitter or check out his YouTube channel and website for more.